But all bets are now well and truly off. Thamsanqa Dyantyi, the South African who appeared on the platform at the Nelson Mandela memorial event in Soweto this week, is the most famous sign language interpreter on the planet.

There’s just one teeny, tiny problem – as the Limping Chicken brought to wider attention. Dyantyi may not be an interpreter. He didn’t use South African Sign Language. In fact, he didn’t use any language. What he produced there was 100% authentic gibberish.

It’s pretty clear that we haven’t seen the last of this story. But what is its real significance? Here are ten lessons for the world from The Tale of the Fake Interpreter.

Using a sign language fluently is not something one can do just by waving one’s hands around. Sign languages are grammatically-structured, rule-governed systems like all other natural human languages. You can’t produce meaningful signing off the cuff and – equally importantly – you can’t understand it spontaneously just by looking.

If you can’t sign, but require interpreting, you need reliable processes to help you identify effective provision. Interpreting isn’t a game: it should be run on a professional basis. This time, we saw a spectacular insult to the world’s Deaf people: but no-one died. Worldwide, every day, the result of inadequate interpreting leads to poor schooling, imprisonment, unemployment and health disparities. This must stop.

Without proper training, screening and regulation, people can and will take advantage. Even in countries like the UK, where sign language interpreting has become increasingly professionalised since the 1980s, smooth operators (who can talk the talk but not sign the sign) are legion. If you can’t sign, they may appear wholly plausible and be wholly bogus. Don’t guess and you won’t be fooled.

This episode is just the high-visibility version of the con-men who pretend to be poor Deaf people in order to extort money by begging on the streets. It’s an age-old phenomenon in a new guise, taking advantage of public authorities’ need to present a politically correct face. They think they’ll get away with it because no-one who can do anything about it will notice or complain.

Here are five more: but beware – these are conclusions some will find easy to reach, but which should be resisted.

‘Always trust Deaf people to tell you who is a good interpreter.’ Not so fast. Deaf people know fluent signing when they see it and they know who they respect and trust – and these are vital. But when it comes to recognising that someone is appropriately representing meaning, you have to be able to access both languages. You can’t tell whether output matches input unless both are available to you.

‘There’s too much to lose in booking the wrong interpreter, so let’s stop using them.’ For all the risks – and they’re very real – the life prospects of Deaf people have plainly been enhanced via good interpreting services. The Deaf Finnish leader, Liisa Kauppinen, received the 2013 United Nations Human Rights Award Prize on the day of Mandela’s memorial service: her achievements would have been impossible without top-notch interpreting. But crucially, quality counts – cosmetic interpreting that’s just for show is destructive.

‘Sign language interpreters cannot be trusted’. Untrue: but not everyone who claims to be an interpreter should be taken seriously. What matters is having robust and reliable ways of distinguishing the real diamonds from the plastic forgeries.

‘After this outcry, public awareness and recognition of sign languages is assured.’ Hang on! Don’t start getting complacent just yet. The sudden global focus presents a real opportunity to push home the demand for change, and to raise standards everywhere: but it won’t happen by itself. Here in Scotland, a British Sign Language Bill is due to go to Parliament in 2014 – all Scots who value signing should put their shoulders to the wheel and keep on pushing. The same is true worldwide.

‘It could never happen here.’ Sadly, whilst out-and-out frauds like this may be rare, any Deaf person can tell you that there are hordes of ‘unconsciously incompetent’ signers out there making a living by accepting interpreting work that is way beyond their capability. It’s true all around the globe. What’s worse, it happens under the noses of the authorities, who pay the bills without caring enough to take responsibility for standards. We must make them care.

Thamsanqa Dyantyi happens to be South African, but the issues he has highlighted are global. Nelson Mandela’s death has lit an unexpected spark: and as Mandela himself said, “The time is always ripe to do right”.

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At one meeting we had one of the two interpreters was incompetent. At the end the organiser gave thanks to the two wonderful interpreters. We thought how the hell did she know they were wonderful, We said nothing, we should have, still feel guilty after all these years.

Thanks for this article – a lot of good stuff is coming out of this sad situation – a real opportunity to educate the world. For the “other” millions of deaf, deafened, and people with hearing loss globally, please take a moment to add number 11 which applies to us all together – and it’s so very important and often missed: Live quality captioning must be included at all public events. This is not to replace quality SL of course, and it’s not only for mega-millions of oral deaf and folks with hearing loss (who don’t use SL) – it’s to facilitate inclusion of many others too. With this number 11, naturally vital for us, long live some mistakes if they push us forward to equal communication access for all.
Lauren/CCAC/volunteer advocates

Excellent points, Graham. So much brilliant stuff is coming out of this episode. Just one thing I would like to add, which relates partly to Lauren/CCAC’s post as well. In your Lesson 6 – among ‘conclusions to be resisted’ – you quite rightly say, “…when it comes to recognising that someone is appropriately representing meaning, you have to be able to access both languages.” Absolutely true. But too many people interpret this to mean that, therefore, Deaf people can’t do this. But if there is an accurate speech-to-text (or what Lauren calls ‘live quality captioning’) service, against which Deaf people can check the interpreting they are seeing, then they are perfectly capable of judging the quality of the interpretation. I recognise that it is easier in one way to monitor a spoken language against a visual language than to flick between two visual languages, one written, but I know highly educated Deaf people who are perfectly capable of doing this well enough to form a judgment.
There are also – and this is a point that I keep hammering in these discussions – a growing number of qualified Deaf interpreters, some of whom are capable of following a speech-to-text autocue in order to produce a sign language interpretation that is on a par with the very best BSL/English interpreters. As well, of course, as being able to take a prompt from a very good BSL/English interpreter and relaying that into a BSL that is often more ‘native’ and comfortable for the Deaf audience, depending on context.

Yes, well said Robert – and, we know some SL interpreters, as well as students, use the real time text (CART/STTR) also, when it’s there, to check on some details when needed – hopefully, along with better education for all students with hearing loss, deafened, or deaf, captioning will be mentioned and used much more. Election campaigning for one example among thousands of gaps, rarely have live captioning (or SL either), and so important.

Some excellent points. Although point five suggests some prejudice. I can count thirty hearing BSL users amongst my Facebook friends alone. Two of them, being children of deaf adults, have BSL as their first language. Let’s not fall into the trap of stereotyping into camps.

11. ‘Always trust academically trained interpreters to tell you who’s a good interpreter’. Not so fast. Deaf people know fluent signing when they see it and they know who they respect and trust – and these are vital. But when it comes to recognising that someone is appropriately representing meaning, you have to be able to access both languages. You can’t tell whether output matches input unless both are available to you.

The world needs to enforce certification requirements for sign language interpreters the same way they require certification for teachers, social workers, pharmacists, doctors, lawyers, and any other major profession. It’s the only way to insure the message gets through from the source to the Deaf consumers.

Well said Graham! Secondly well done on the original and correct spelling of Dyantyis surname, every newspaper seem to have it wrong. Anyway…. I agree with all the points although I also believe one have to have full acces to both languages to adequately evaluate accuracy etc,
Now in a country like ours South Africa where because of the legacy of apartheid SASL interpreters are also promoted based on color and not on quality (although this is not always the case)
What happens when Deaf people say a white interpreter is a ‘good’ and better nterpreter over an excellent black interpreter? When does point 6 become reliable??

Are deaf people included in the decision of who to hire? Perhaps if there were a committee of deaf people who are proficient in both the spoken language that will be used at an event and the sign language of the country, they could screen several candidates and choose the best one. They could use technology to access the spoken language through captioning. This should be part of the certification process as well.

[…] We may have thought sign language interpreting reached peak prominence when the Queen was shadowed by an interpreter at the opening of the London Paralympic Games in September 2012 . Then the bar w… […]